We have been seeing this spreading across workplaces, governments, and public spaces.
The ERG that went quiet. The “inclusion” language scrubbed from the company website. The job posting that no longer mentions equity. The town hall where leadership assured everyone that “the culture hasn’t changed” — while the people who built that culture started updating their LinkedIn profiles.
What you’re feeling right now has a name. It’s grief.
What’s Actually Happening — And Why It Hurts
Since early 2025, DEI rollbacks have accelerated dramatically. In the United States, executive orders signed by the Trump administration directed federal departments to terminate DEI programs — and the ripple effects have reached Canada. Major corporations including Amazon, Meta, Disney, and Walmart have scaled back or quietly dismantled diversity initiatives. Canadian public companies are pulling back on DEI disclosure for the first time in over a decade, according to a 2025 Osler report, citing “rapid and significant changes in the broader political, regulatory, and business environment.”
The companies aren’t just changing policies. They’re sending a message.
For BIPOC employees who watched these programs get built — who advocated for them, staffed them, sometimes were them — that message lands as something very specific: you were a priority when it was convenient. You’re not anymore.
This Is an Identity Wound, Not Just a Workplace Concern
Mainstream conversations about DEI rollbacks tend to focus on business metrics: retention rates, talent pipelines, brand risk. These matter. But they miss something more fundamental.
For many racialized people, DEI programs weren’t just HR policy. They were the first time your organization said, formally and publicly, that your presence mattered. That you belonged. That your advancement was worth structuring systems around — not just hoping for.
When those programs disappear, it doesn’t just change your workplace conditions. It reaches back and destabilizes something you may have already been managing carefully: your sense of safety, your sense of place, your belief that belonging was possible here.
This is what therapists who work with racialized clients sometimes call a racial identity wound — the particular exhaustion and disorientation that comes when an institution withdraws a safety it once extended. It can show up as anxiety. Hypervigilance. Difficulty concentrating. A grief that can feel like an overreaction to “just a policy change.”
But it’s not an overreaction, it is a very appropriate reaction to a space that is signalling to you that it is not as safe as it was before – and in some instances – now a hostile space.
Grief Is the Right Word
Grief has a structure to it. It’s not linear, but it has recognizable terrain: disbelief, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and rarely in that order.
What many BIPOC professionals are describing right now fits this framework closely:
- Disbelief: “I can’t believe they actually did it.”
- Anger: “We did the work. We built the programs. And now they just—”
- Bargaining: “Maybe if I reframe my contributions differently, stay under the radar…”
- Depression: “What was the point? Was any of it real?”
This is grief. And you don’t have to justify it or make it smaller so colleagues who aren’t affected can feel comfortable.
What This Might Feel Like in Your Body
The mental health impacts of workplace concerns, like lack of safety, aren’t always named as such. They get mislabeled as burnout, imposter syndrome, or just “stress.” But the research is increasingly clear: experiences of racial discrimination and institutional betrayal have measurable effects on mental and physical health — including elevated cortisol, sleep disruption, and symptoms that overlap with anxiety and depression.
If you’re noticing any of the following, your nervous system is responding to something real:
- A low-grade dread about going to work (or opening Slack)
- Difficulty trusting your own read on situations
- Feeling the need to manage how much of yourself you show
- Replaying conversations, second-guessing your words
- Numbness, flatness, or a creeping sense that nothing matters
This is what it costs to show up in spaces that no longer create the safety needed for you to feel a sense of belonging. And if you are already having to do this emotional labour in the workplace – you don’t want to do it in a therapy space.
Why Working with a BIPOC Therapist Can Make a Real Difference
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having to contextualize your experience before you can even get to it. When you work with a therapist who shares your background — or who has done serious, specific work to understand racialized experience — you skip a step. You don’t have to explain why the DEI rollback hit differently. You don’t have to translate.
Anti-oppressive therapy approaches the individual in context. It doesn’t treat your workplace distress as a personal failing or a cognitive distortion to be reframed. It understands that what’s happening to you has structural roots — and it helps you find solid ground without requiring you to minimize what you’re carrying.
Whether you’re in Toronto, Vancouver, or elsewhere in Canada, finding a practitioner who gets this can be the difference between a therapeutic relationship that helps and one that adds another layer of labour.
Healing in Colour’s directory connects clients with BIPOC and allied therapists across Canada who offer culturally affirming, anti-oppressive care. If what you’re navigating right now is showing up as anxiety or depression, browse therapists who specialize in those areas — including practitioners who understand the racial dimensions of both.
You’re Not Overreacting. You’re Responding.
Belonging was offered. Now it’s being taken back — or at minimum, made conditional again on corporate convenience.
That’s worth grieving. It’s worth naming. And it’s worth getting support that actually meets you where you are.
You deserved better at work. And you deserve support that starts from that premise.
Ready to Find Your Therapist?
Search the Healing in Colour directory now for therapists who specialize in workplace concerns:
You can find a therapist that deals with workplace concerns on our therapist directory by clicking “Workplace Concerns” under the “Areas of Practice” drop down menu.
Additional Resources
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About Healing in Colour
Healing in Colour is a directory of BIPOC therapists and professionals across Canada who are committed to anti-oppressive values. We envision a world where BIPOC, in all our intersections, have access to therapy that supports our healing and liberation.